A revolution is brewing.

Unrest is an interesting take on the role-playing genre, since it eschews many genre conventions and opts instead to give us a role-playing game in the purest sense of the phrase. From the outset, Unrest plays much more like a point-and-click adventure game than an RPG.

It features the stories of six “protagonists”, each with their own backstory, goals, abilities and traits. When it comes to writing, Unrest oozes quality. Almost every character I talked to was a well-defined person with his or her own goals, ambitions and traits, rather than a quest-dispensing NPC. Dialogue seems to have been written with accuracy in mind rather than flavour, and some of it comes off as a bit awkward, but it’s forgivable owing to the setting.

Speaking of the setting, Unrest’s various stories take place in Bhimra - a city loosely based on the mythology and fantasy of ancient India. As such, there’s a thick layer of ancient India’s caste system, traditions and beliefs throughout the game. This can be noticed when talking to any character in the game, be it a lowly guard standing outside temple gates or even one of the protagonists’ antagonistic parents.

To understand the entirety of what’s happening in the story, each playable character has a journal filled with information about characters, locations and even concepts that are integral. While some may groan thinking about the excess amounts of reading in Unrest (and there’s a lot of reading), I’d say that this cuts down on the fluff that you’d often have to get through when meeting a new character. Sticking to walls of texts rather than getting voice actors also allowed developer Pyrodactyl to get more verbose with Unrest’s dialogue and descriptions.

The entirety of the game can be played with nothing more than the left-click of your mouse. However, if you so desire, there are keybindings for keyboards and even support for an Xbox 360 controller and Steam’s Big Picture mode.

Sound and visuals are my biggest gripes with Unrest. The art style betrays the relatively low budget of Unrest (it managed to get $36,251 during its Kickstarter run). Most of the environments look great, but individual character sprites end up looking quite bland, with little to differentiate one character from another apart from conveniently-placed name tags. The music is pretty atmospheric for most part, but seeing as how much of the game is exploration-centric, listening to the same music over and over on loop can get a bit grating.

The Verdict

Unrest lives up to its tagline of being an unconventional RPG. Its heavy focus on the story does wonders thanks to some great writing, and almost every character you meet or play will have understandable backstories, motivations and traits. Its graphical style and music, however, are its weakest points. That said, if graphics don’t bother you one bit, Unrest is definitely a great game, and it’s accessible enough for almost anyone to start playing.